Alumni in the Field

Michael Brown, MA 1999, PhD 2011

Curator of European Art, The San Diego Museum of Art

Looking back, there were several factors that led to the decision to pursue a PhD in art history. I grew up visiting museums, especially the Cleveland Museum of Art; I studied AP art history in high school, and when my parents moved to London, I spent summer breaks there immersed in its museums: the V&A, Tate, and the National Gallery, where I was drawn very profoundly to the work of Diego Velázquez. When I told my undergraduate advisor that I wanted to go to graduate school to study Spanish art, his immediate response was that I needed to work with Jonathan Brown. I still remember the excitement of receiving the IFA’s acceptance letter. Ominously thin, it nevertheless bore good news and changed my life in wonderful ways. At every stage, I would enjoy tremendous support from IFA faculty and staff, as well as my parents, sisters, and late brother, Chris, who came to New York to cheerlead my dissertation defense.

As awe-inducing one’s first (and second, if I’m honest) entrance into Duke House is, nothing could prepare me for what the next years held in store. My memory of the first day of “school”—which would culminate with a doctoral degree in 2011—remains clear to this day. Although we are now spread out around the world, the people I met that day remain the closest of friends. The first semester was the most intellectually stimulating and challenging of my life. It was a thrill. My first seminar focused on Velázquez, Rubens, and Van Dyck, a kind of personal pantheon. It was also around this time that The Institute began to integrate the arts of Viceregal Latin America as a field of study, making it an international leader attracting students from around the world. We were included in the fundraising events for the new program, which gave us access to donors and collectors in the field. Several became lifelong friends and supporters, and a visit to one such collector in Denver in 2000, with Jonathan and my two closest classmates, would prove momentous.

At the Institute, I was pushed beyond my comfort zone of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spain, Latin America, and the Netherlands. Thanks to the faculty’s broad range, the wisdom of out-ofarea requirements, and brilliant fellow students, I learned about Brazil, North Africa, Haiti, and Syria. Thanks to the unwavering support of Edward Sullivan, my first public lecture and publication were both on twentieth-century Puerto Rico. This wellrounded training gave me the tools I would come to rely on as a museum curator.

Beyond the Institute’s academic rigor and its stellar faculty, students were given the chance to learn hands-on. This meant invaluable experience at the city’s “teaching hospitals,” i.e., The Metropolitan Museum, the Hispanic Society, and The Frick Collection. This was a time of big life events as I met my future wife, Danielle, a southern California native in her first teaching job in New York. With my coursework completed, my education would continue as a doctoral fellow in Viceregal-era Hispanic arts at the Denver Art Museum’s Mayer Center, where I completed my dissertation. Our first two sons were born in Denver, before the exhilarating opportunity to join the San Diego Museum of Art arose. For Danielle, our move was a homecoming.

Since 2014, I have had the great privilege to acquire for SDMA paintings by Zurbarán, Ribera, Valdés Leal, and Sorolla, as well as a compelling new video installation by Cauleen Smith. The international network of IFA alumni has been instrumental in every project and exhibition over the years, culminating in 2019 with Art and Empire: the Golden Age of Spain, a show that relied heavily on collaborations with numerous IFA graduates and faculty who served as authors, speakers, and lenders to the show. Velázquez and Rubens, as they had in 1997, had brought us all together once again.

Conservator for Rare and Distinctive Collections at Cornell University Library

The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) is a program of Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia that brings together an interdisciplinary network of scholars to promote the study of the history of the book. This spring, two members of the IFA community were inducted into the SoFCB as Junior Fellows in recognition of their individual research on the art of the book – IFA PhD candidate Christopher Richards and Trina Parks MA/MS 2020, currently the Conservator for Rare and Distinctive Collections at Cornell University Library.

Broadly defined, critical bibliography is the study of books as material artifacts through the various lenses of literary studies, history, art history, archaeology, and library sciences. Christopher, who researches illuminated medieval manuscripts and the history of sexuality, comments that “Critical bibliographers understand their scholarship as ‘critical’ because we believe that books actively participate in the world, shaping institutions and social structures. Books are, therefore, fruitful sites of social critique, queer critique in my case.” Members of the SoFCB address urgent contemporary concerns by incorporating the principles of critical bibliography into their research, teaching, and public-facing engagement.

Trina first considered critical bibliography and its relationship to book conservation at the IFA. As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Library and Archive Conservation, she was provided support to attend a course at RBS where she learned to describe the physical characteristics of printed books and recognize material evidence of how the book was printed, bound, and distributed. She notes “This informs my work as a conservator every day as I am always considering the research value not just of the text, but of the physical manifestation of that text in context—how it was first manufactured and experienced when new, and how researchers are likely to study it now and in the future. In recent years, conservators have recognized that conservation is not neutral and in doing so our field is beginning to consider just what ‘critical conservation’ might look like.” The Junior Fellowship is a generous two-year program that includes attendance at the SoFCB’s annual meeting, two RBS courses, and support to host a symposium at their home institutions on the topic of critical bibliography. This summer, Christopher will attend the course “Why Black Bibliography Matters” at RBS hosted by Princeton University. Trina will be using the fellowship to take courses on the history of the book in East Asia as she begins to develop preservation strategies for the rare book collections in Cornell’s Kroch Asia Library. She adds “I am especially grateful to the SoFCB for naming me the 2022-24 Nancy Norton Tomasko Fellow in support of my interests in conservation, papermaking, and Chinese books.”

Both Christopher and Trina celebrate the rich opportunities for collaboration and community already presented by this cross-discipline dialogue. Christopher shares “It is a real honor to have the opportunity to collaborate with the other fellows, like Trina, who has a different geographic and period focus from me, but who also care deeply about books as both material and theoretical objects. It’s such a privilege to work with such a diverse and curious group of thinkers, united in our love of books!”The Institute of Fine Arts Annual 2021 - 2022

The SoFCB invites applications from early career scholars and researchers in all fields to join the Junior Fellows program. Applications will open in Fall 2022. More information is available online.

GET ON THE MAP!

The Institute maintains an interactive map of all active alumni on our website.

Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Art + Design at the University of Tampa, program coordinator, BA in Museum Studies

Art History as an Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The IFA trained me to be an art historian, a scholar who focuses on content and theory to interpret the cultural artifacts that humans create to make meaning of their world. But teaching undergraduate art history is another beast altogether. As an Assistant Teaching Professor my role focuses primarily on teaching, so it’s convenient that my scholarship now centers on pedagogy. Over years of trial and error and conversation and debate both inside and outside the classroom, my developing identity as a scholarly teacher eventually forged a new scholarly path for me within the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history. It now permeates nearly all aspects of my academic life—from teaching to scholarship to professional service—because I orient every project toward the same goal: “What skills or competencies must my students gain, not only to be successful in my art history class, but that they can also take into any other discipline and leverage them, transfer them, to be successful anywhere?”

The vast majority of students in the audience were not arts or humanities majors, and there were several moments of confusion or discomfort at (what they perceived to be the extraordinary) subjectivity of a sample visual analysis or the relative lack of rigor in an investigative process sparked by a random wondering (rather than the specific “empirical observation” commanded by the scientific method). Indeed, anyone who teaches undergraduate art history is probably familiar with this phenomenon: the sudden and intense look of panic that emerges upon the face of a student who realizes that, in this class, there is no “right answer.” In February of 2022 I gave an invited Symposium lecture for the Honors Program here at the University of Tampa that I titled “Art History as an Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.” In it, I challenged my audience to question some of their most fundamental assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the nature of research and the investigative process, and the purported objectivity of the scientific method. Indeed, I asked them to question the very possibility of a single correct or “true” answer to any given question.

Colleges and universities have long espoused the need to teach their students such key workforce skills as “critical thinking” and “clear communication,” but the means by which it is best to do so remain the constant subject of debate, discussion, assessment, and inevitable re-design. Art historians know well the value of the interdisciplinary competencies we teach, but repeated reliance on such disciplinary terms as “visual literacy” or “object-based learning” risks their becoming empty buzzwords rather than effective tools for communicating what art history offers a liberal arts campus under pressure to quantify learning for the job market. Rather than focusing exclusively on the production of knowledge within our own areas of hyper-specialization, what if the future of art history emphasized our role in enhancing student performance across academic disciplines?

We have the capacity to train all students, regardless of their academic or career ambition, in skills essential to becoming global citizens who can operate effortlessly between fields and specialties. I have become the loudest and most staunch advocate at my university for reframing art history’s core skills as universal (rather than disciplinespecific) training toward shared competencies because I believe it affords an important opportunity for rethinking this discipline’s role on the liberal arts campus. I’m quite enjoying the ride, and welcome anyone who wants to jump on it with me.

Assistant Director, Sardis Expedition, and Expedition Administrator, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Harvard Art Museums

When I began at the IFA 30 years ago, I was a student of Spanish art under the guidance of the late Jonathon Brown, a path forged through the study of Spanish and Latin American art with Edward Sullivan in my undergraduate years at NYU. That year in 1992 there were extensive exhibitions in New York City to immerse oneself directly in those visual cultures. Studying the artworks in detail through direct examination of the original objects was a profound experience, and the skills of visual and contextual analysis of cultural material I learned in the process proved invaluable in my research, which as fate would have it, turned to the field of classical art and archaeology, particularly in Turkey.

Thanks to the degree requirements of the master’s program, I was able to take a seminar by Bert (R.R.R.) Smith on the ancient site of Aphrodisias in southwestern Turkey. As a result of serendipity and the invaluable support of Bert, I found myself at NYU’s excavations at Aphrodisias in the summer of 1993 as an excavator under the direction of Christopher Ratté cleaning out old trenches for re-examination. At that time, my Turkish was quite limited, much less than my Spanish, to the surprise of many on the team, and it was ultimately through archaeology at the site that I was able to re-engage with Turkish culture and discover my roots as a second-generation immigrant of Turkish parents. I also vividly recall the first face-to-face encounter I had that summer with the remarkable marble portrait heads in the museum depots at Aphrodisias. I learned how to describe and photograph the marble pieces in detail and the importance of working closely with conservators to prepare them for display in the museum. After that first summer, indelibly carved into my memory, I was enamored of the field and pursued a doctoral thesis on marble architectural reliefs from the Civil Basilica at Aphrodisias, under the direction of Bert Smith. I also fell in love with Ayşin Yoltar, who was also an IFA grad student and team member at the site, and thanks to Aphrodite we have been together ever since.

My dissertation years took me on journeys through Turkey, Italy, and, as a German Academic Exchange Service fellow, through Germany. I continued my research as a post-doctoral fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, under the tutelage of its director Paul Zanker, after which I taught as an adjunct in the art history department at NYU, where I began my journey in art history. Soon after, I went to Turkey, this time on a more permanent basis as the resident director of the Ankara branch of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), where from 2002-2008 I was able to facilitate graduate research in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in the field of archaeology. I learned an incredible amount about the extent of archaeological research in Turkey and the importance of having non-profit institutions like ARIT as a support in navigating the relationships with the myriad entities involved in archaeological projects.

As the wheels of life spun, I found the opportunity of another homecoming in my return to the IFA as the field director of NYU’s excavations at Aphrodisias in 2008-2009. It was an incredibly gratifying coda to the journey I had begun 16 years before. I was able to work closely again with Bert, Katherine Welch, and students and colleagues at the IFA, and give back by facilitating the investigation and preservation of the site and the learning and research of students, scholars, conservators, and stakeholders at the IFA and in Turkey. I continue these pursuits, now for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an ancient site not far from Aphrodisias, as its assistant director and the expedition administrator of its administrative headquarters at the Harvard Art Museums.

None of this story would have been possible without the extraordinary formative years at NYU and the IFA, which prepared me to contribute to discovery and learning in so many ways and to take on various roles in my journeys: a gift for which I am eternally grateful.

Curator of Modern Art, The Baker Museum

Igraduated from the IFA in 2008, trained as a specialist in early modern European art with my PhD dissertation on Albrecht Dürer under Professor Colin Eisler. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, where I also earned my undergraduate degree, I’d intended to return there and become a professor. Little did I know while in the PhD program that my path would lead to working with modern and contemporary art and that I’d find my true calling as a generalist curator. I’m currently Curator of Modern Art at Artis–Naples, The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, having joined this multidisciplinary institution in June 2019. I’m also one of the ten international curators selected by the Association of Art Museum Curators for its 2021–2022 Mentorship program. At The Baker Museum, I’ve activated its underutilized permanent collection in such exhibitions as Subject Matters (2020) and Making a Mark: American Women Artists (2021). Curating its annual exhibition Florida Contemporary, I delighted in the chance to diversify the media and artists represented in the museum, showcasing works by Latinx artists and women, such as Akiko Kotani, a third-generation Japanese American artist.

I sometimes lightheartedly say I’m a recovering academic. But since, for me, the museum is a public space for humanistic education, I still consider myself an educator—which means being a knowledge-facilitator and change-maker. I was a full-time professor for six years, teaching everything from early modern European to modern and contemporary art at nationally ranked institutions including Trinity University, Texas; Central College in Iowa; and Chapman University in California. That laid the foundation for my particular museum career. When I moved to Florida, I started out as a curatorial fellow, working under Ena Heller, another IFA alumna, at Rollins Museum of Art in 2013. I found ways to combine my educational expertise with hands-on experience in community-building when I then held the dual position of Director of Experiences and Curator at the Art & History Museums–Maitland (A&H).

This small organization offered me extraordinary opportunities to go through the full process of conceptualizing and implementing exhibitions and public programs, while gaining practical administrative skills. One unforgettable aspect of my work was overseeing the artist residency program and interacting with artists immersed in their creative process; it was the best kind of eye-opening experience. Those one-on-one interactions with artists are still the bedrock of my curatorial work, and one of the most energizing and meaningful parts of my work as a curator and art historian.

No academic achievement has been as rewarding for me as the creative and imaginative work I do in the gallery space, or the arts advocacy and community engagement I find in museum work. I tap into my varied experiences of navigating through and integrating into American culture as I strive to transform museums into open, inclusive spaces. For me, the American idiom of “a cog in a wheel” evokes a positive image. Seeing myself as a small part of a big movement for positive change for the next generation motivates and inspires me in my work and, more recently, in my writing. My essay on Jacopo de’ Barbari’s career in Northern Europe is to be published this year by Duke University in a collection, A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View. Right now, I’m thrilled to be working on a solo exhibition opening in October 2022 of Korean artist Ran Hwang. And one of my passion projects is contributing essays to the magazine, A Women’s Thing. I see all this as doing my part to increase visibility for women artists and changing the conversation by contributing my own vision.